My latest piece for comment is free, which addresses the need for monetary reform in the wake of the G20 summit, and was published on Sunday while I was in Belgium, has attracted a large number of positive comments. Very encourgaging.
The truly great Billy Bragg has this piece over at Comment is Free just now in which he correctly describes the consequences of Margaret Thatcher's victory over the miners, who began their famous strike 25 years today.
Whatever you think about miners' leader Arthur Scargill, and he certainly made many mistakes and suffers deep psychological flaws, everything he claimed would come to pass were the Tory government to get its way has done so.
Hearing the obsequious Lord Tebbitt talking about the context of the strike on the Today programme this morning was really quite vomit-inducing, so it's good to see the Bard of Barking putting the record straight.
These concluding paragraphs from Anotole Kaletsky's column in today's Times should stir the passions of any self-respecting progressive:
So economics is on the brink of a paradigm shift. We are where astronomy was when Copernicus realised that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The academic economics of the past 20 years is comparable to pre-Copernican astronomy, with its mysterious heavenly cogs, epicycles and wheels within wheels or maybe even astrology, with its faith in star signs.
The academic Establishment will resist such a
shift, as it always does. But luckily economists understand incentives.
They should now be given a clear choice: embrace new ideas or return
their public funding and Nobel prizes, alongside the bankers' bonuses
they justified and inspired.
Alas, as you might expect from the always stimulating, but rarely anything but conventional Kaletsky, the rest of his piece says little about the nature of this paradigm shift.
The problem is that in order to be a successful academic economists, you have to toe the establishment, neo-classical, line. This narrow form of economics, which forms the basis of all economics text-books and teaching makes a set of assumptions about the foundations of the economy, and proceeds then to examine how this particular kind of economy works.
Any economists that values their career will not question these assumptions for fear of rocking the boat. As Keynes said 'In the City, it's better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." The same applies to academic economics. And it largely explains why we're in the mess we're currently in.
What is needed is a rejuvenation of the discipline of political economy, of the kind practiced by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Henry George, Joseph Schumpeter. J.K. Galbraith and E.F Scumacher among others. Political economists need to wrest back the discipline from the econometricists that have come to dominate the profession. Their assumptions must be assessed against ethical criteria. We need to ask the question, 'what kind of economy and society do we want?' and then set about devising economic structures and institutions fit for the purpose of delivering that moral vision.
Brian Hodgkinson's book, A New Model of the Economy, is a good place to start for any economists that want to be in at the start of the paradigm shift.
I have this new piece over at Comment is Free this morning. Part of the series entitled, Who owns the progressive future, it suggests that rather than rehearse old arguments between left and right, we should instead look for inspiration to some as yet untried ideas of the past, with reference to the thought of Karl Polanyi and Henry George.
With UK unemployment nudging 2 million once again (and that's the official count - if we apply the measurement criteria used back in the 1970s, it's now well over three million) it's time to ask again a simple question: just what, and more to the point, who, is the economy for, and what ends it is supposed to serve?
It's not - or should not be - rocket science: the economy consists of those mechanisms and institutions in society through which its members secure for themselves the means to survival and satisfaction in life in exchange for their labour.
For the last thirty years, however, the objective of full employment has fallen off the radar of economic policy because the neo-classical school of economics that has come to dominate the political and academic establishments has persuade people in large numbers that economic policies focussing on continuous growth and low inflation offer the best hope for economic advance.
This argument is now revealed as a gigantic con-trick, pulled off by economists and politicians, ably aided by much of the mainstream media, in the service of the interests of elite wealth and privilege. Democracy, meanwhile, appears quite unable to defend majority interests.
I'm not arguing that the state should take responsibility for directly creating jobs for those whom the market doesn't provide. But there needs to be a moral basis for economic policy, and key among the values referenced should be a commitment to an economy in which everyone has access to the resources and opportunities necessary to make a reasonable living for themselves.
By starting from that belief, and ensuring it remains the over-riding goal in policy formulation, it should be possible to restructure the economy along more just and inclusive lines. Presently however, there seems little chance of such progress.
The chances of creating a more just, inclusive, sustainable and human world are a little better after the victory of Barack Obama. America is a country full of contradictions, but as Mike Tomasky - who now deserves a vacation as much as the cadidate himself - observes here, it could not have happened anywhere else.
When America has a good day, the rest of us can afford to celebrate the fact that the United States remains the world's only superpower. I have my doubts about Obama: anyone who achieves his stunning level of success must necessarily have kept very quiet about any plans to change the world. But, for those of us who know how urgent the need for substantial, structural change is, an Obama White House provides a much better context in which to make our case. As Tomasky concludes, it's been a good night.
If, as now seems very likely, Barack Obama is elected to the Presidency today, it will be an historic moment. But what it will mean for United States policy - both domestic and foreign - remains unclear. The world moves very slowly, especially in respect of building a more inclusive and sustainable global society.
There's been little in his rhetoric to suggest Obama is a radical, and in any case, as veteran US commentator James Ridgeway points out, the realities of congressional inertia and the country's continuing dependence on foreign oil suggest that while the place might look very different to outsiders, it will take some considerable time before any real progressive gains are made.
There's an excellent piece by Andrew Martin in today's Guardian on the consequences of the assault on our previously class-based society; many of which are negative. As Andrew points out, when the only measure of success in life is wealth, many of the more noble values held by the privileged classes of earlier generations are lost. Without class, it seems, we are all less classy; and that is not a good thing.
These words from the concluding paragraph of Rachel North's excellent piece on knife crime in today's Independent could, of course, apply to all manner of social problems.
We need, collectively, to outgrow the assumption that life and society is necessarily competitive and, therefore, inevitably sometimes violent, before we can successfully address the pointless waste of young people's lives on the streets of London and elsewhere.
I have a new piece over at Comment is Free now, which you can read here.
It's a response to Aditya Chakrobortty's challenge to progressives to do better in their response to the current economics crisis.
For me, the 1950s and 1960s are perhaps the most interesting decades of the twentieth century. Admittedly, they came after two world wars and the biggest depression in history, and they preceded the free-market revolution which laid the foundations for economic globalisation. Nonetheless, what happened socially and culturally in these two decades set the political agenda for every decade since; and helps to explain why our social and moral aspirations are now so out of synch which the direction of economic advance.
If you doubt me, you should tune into Mad Men, the latest quality drama from the United States. As most critics are saying, it is almost perfect: rarely can a TV drama have re-created an only recently bygone age so effectively. Watching last night's episode, I quickly forgot it was television, it's almost too good for that medium.
I have long wondered why the Americans are so good at producing top quality original drama when we Brits have such a poor track record, especially recently. You can only flog the Poliakoff horse so often.
In yesterday's Observer, Will Hutton had a go at answering that question with some success. Although his conclusions do not bode well for the prospects of a revival in British TV drama.
As he says,
Too many people believe public-service broadcasting is outdated, hindering television; it will take a cultural revolution at the channel to persuade commissioners that paradoxically the best way of systematically delivering great programmes in a British market is to fuse public-service broadcasting values with commerciality.
Hutton's article is worth a read, and if you haven't watched Mad Men yet, there are two repeats of this weeks episode: on Tuesday evening on BBC2, and again on Thursday evening on BBC4 (yes, it's on the Beeb so no bloody commercials!).
Last Saturday's Guardian carried an extract from Julian Barnes' forthcoming memoir, Nothing to be Frightened of. An excellent read, and, as you would expect from Barnes, beautifully written.
I particularly enjoyed this line, where Barnes, when describing his father, says.
When I was an unforgiving adolescent, I judged him weak. Later, I thought him compliant. Later still, autonomous in his views but disinclined to argue for them.
I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who feels disinclined to argue for their views. And it strikes me that the more autonomous one's views, the more sensible such disinclination is.
My thoughts on this take me back to the the words of the great theologian/philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr who said, many years ago,
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
OK, the quote has been overused, and can be construed as being unambitious. But Niebuhr was not arguing that there's no point in trying to change things beyond your direct control. By urging people to find the courage to change those things that can be changed, he was reminding us of the importance of finding the right strategy to promote change.
As Julian Barnes realised, his Father had come to the conclusion that some people just aren't worth challenging, but that is not a sign of weakness. It is perfectly possible to be steadfast in one's own convictions, but also to recognise that others have a different psychological make-up which necessarily prevents them from seeing points of view alien to their own.
Sometimes, and alas this applies all too often on discussion fora like the one over at Comment is Free, it's simply not worth challenging people on certain issues. That is not to say that those of us who believe in the possibility of creating a more just and inclusive world should throw in the towel, just that we need to work out a better strategy for change than simply forcing our opinions and world view down the throats of others, and then throwing up our arms in despair when they spit it back in our faces.
David Aaronovitch has this reasonably balanced piece on the arguments for and against a national DNA database in today's Times.
My gut instinct is to oppose such a database; I suspect the disbenefits would outweigh the advantages, and I'm not sure government, the police or any other public body are up to managing it effectively or cost-effectively. At the same time, I struggle to fully identify with what Aaronovitch terms the 'intelligencia default position' that we are 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society'.
As I wrote last year, my biggest concern about such initiatives is that by using technology to address the symptoms of deep social problems, rather than tackling the roots causes, the incentive to build a better society is steadily diminished.
There's currently a rather scary vision of what society might look like a few years hence on BBC1 each Sunday evening, in the thriller The Last Enemy, in which the government is trying to introduce a system called TIA (Total Information Awareness) which would enable the powers to be to track our every move.
It's going to be a while before the technology makes this possible, and even when it does, I'm not sure how the state would fund the necessary investment. Although if things continue as they are, and society and the economy continue to morph into a mechanism principally geared to the consolidation of minority wealth and privilege, then the state would presumably have no problem finding private backers for such an Orwellian scheme.
There are worrying problems of crime and insecurity facing society today, but would we not be better advised to examine and address the roots causes, rather than using technology to mitigate the symptoms. The current BBC drama does not make for comfortable Sunday evening viewing.
Michael Meacher may be struggling to regain credibility having joined, a little too enthusiastically, in the 9/11 conspiracy theories a few years ago, but this week on comment is free, he reminded us what progressive politics is supposed to be about, and why the Labour party has lost all credibility in the minds of those who believe there's a proper role for government in creating the conditions from which a more just and inclusive society might emerge.
Meacher opens by saying that
as the position of the two main parties becomes increasingly intertwined and the differences between the Blair and Brown variations of neoliberalism become increasingly difficult to detect, the debate about the political fundamentals has dwindled almost to invisibility. Never was ideology more needed, and never was it more lacking.
While I disagree with him that we need a return to ideology, I do think the left/liberal/progressive movement (call it what you will) needs to focus on ideals, and have a debate about values. Until more of us can agree about what is wrong with society (and the global economy) and how we got to this point, we will struggle to know what to do about it, and fail to come up with a viable strategy for change.
Meacher concludes by saying:
It will not be easy for any government to begin to move away from the privatisation, deregulation, unfettered market tenets of neoliberalism which have governed western political economy for the last three decades and to establish again a much more healthy relationship between the market and society. But the gathering international crisis, where money and power have so clearly over-reached themselves, offers a real chance. And re-inspiring the Labour project in the runup to the next election may leave little choice.
I'm afraid that particular task is quite beyond the capacity of the Labour Party in its current state, but the idea of establishing a more healthy relationship the market and society is one that should be taken up by all progressives, within and without the party system.
A very good piece in Saturday's Guardian by Martin Kettle, lamenting the passing of Peter Hain from the government. Kettle reminds us that, whatever you may have thought of his permanent sun-tan, there was something different about Hain. He was pretty much the last survivor of a quite different political era. A time when politics offered hope, and exhibited rather more ambition than it does today.
Kettle goes on to say,
He regularly managed to get the message out that he believed in more redistribution, that trade unions were important, that the voting system should be reformed, that civil liberties should not be dismantled and that Britain's place was in Europe. You can say he did not do any of this effectively enough, or that he should have opposed the Iraq war - or even that he was wrong. But you cannot say that Hain was just a technocrat.
Well worth a read.
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Stephen Smith, who chairs the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust wrote eloquently in yesterday's Guardian about the importance of remembering the Nazi genocide.
Each year the day brings new opportunities to hear from some of those who lost loved ones, and others who managed to survive the extermination camps. But many of the survivors are now nearing the end of their own lives. It is crucial, therefore, that their recollections are preserved and retold for future generations.
One of the reasons I am so committed to the idea of a more just and inclusive world is that the potential to fall into fascism (indeed totalitarianism of any kind) lurks not very far beneath the surface of even the most civilised and superficially democratic of societies.
Its return remains a distinct possibility in an increasingly uncertain world, especially as perceptions (correct or otherwise) of injustice among certain groups continue to grow. This is why it's so important that as many people as possible are encouraged to Imagine, remember, reflect and react, the tagline of this year's commemoration.
If you're much younger than I am, and don't know much about the holocaust, I would recommend you get hold of a copy of Stephen Spielberg's 1998 film, The Last Days. It's not easy to watch - I first saw it at the cinema soon after it's release; as the auditorium emptied many of those present still had tears streaming down their faces - but once you've seen it you'll never forget why it's important to remember.
I have an article in the current edition of Land and Liberty Magazine, the journal of the Henry George Foundation in which you might be interested. Their online presence is not as up to date as it might be, but you can download a pdf of the latest issue. If you do, and you like what you find, please make a donation here.
Most easily of all, you can read my article in full, here.
I was rather frustrated to discover that Art Garfunkel has not read my book. Quite why the frizzy-haired one has gone to the lengths of publishing a list of every book he's read since 1968 I'm not sure, but given that he's taken this rather peculiar decision, you'd think he might have caught up with some of the more essential reading of the last decade, before releasing his list to the world.
After all, I've listened to many of his songs over the years (although I haven't kept a list). Indeed I believe we may still have an old cassette of his and Paul Simon's greatest hits in the car. On second thoughts, I think the kids trampled it to smithereens while we were driving down to Italy last year.
Must say though, with Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving at number 2 on his faves list, and Ouspensky's In Search of The Miraculous at number 3, I wonder if Art and I don't have more than a love of Watership Down in common after all:
Anyway, if he'd been paying attention, he would have noticed that the nice people at Amazon are still offering my book at a discount. And don't believe what they say about only having two copies left in stock: it's a marketing ploy. I happen to know they have hundreds.
Martin Wolf has an excellent analysis of the probable causes of the current turmoil in the financial markets in his FT column this week. Was George Magnus right, he asks, to argue that we are facing a Minsky moment, with
a collapse of debt structures and entities in the wake of asset price decay, the breakdown of ‘normal’ banking functions and the active intervention of central banks?
Wolf argues that there are several contributory factors to the current crisis and people will pick the one, or combination, which suits their perception of how the economy works. But I was particularly interested by this:
a still less orthodox view is that man-made (fiat) money is inherently unstable. All will then be solved when, as Mr Greenspan himself believed, the world goes back on to gold. Human beings must, like Odysseus, be chained to the mast of gold if they are to avoid repeated monetary shipwrecks.
I think that the system of money creation upon which the economy rests is seriously implicated in the failure of markets and regulatory authorities to avoid the manic peaks and and depressing troughs that have plagued economies since the industrial revolution. Certainly there are other contributing factors, but these arise largely as a consequence of the way we allow private banking interests to create money at will, with the result that the exchange value represented by the total money supply has little to do with the quantity of wealth and wellbeing created through economic (and social) activity.
This argument is dealt with very well in Michael Rowbotham's excellent book: Grip of Death, and it is a theme I will explore in detail in my next book.
As for whether the Fed's dramatic decision to slash interest rates will have the desired effect, I'm with Larry Elliott who says today:
... make no mistake, the policy of slashing rates to rescue big finance is both flawed and fraught with risk. The big flaw in the cheap money approach is that it was too much cheap money that got the US (and Britain, for that matter) into difficulties in the first place. If the policy response to the collapse of one bubble is to blow up another one, then that's an indication of intellectual bankruptcy.
Over at the Times, Anatole Kaletsky is more sanguine, although even he argues that some good old-fashioned fiscal intervention by governments will be necessary in order to make the Fed's monetary prescription effective.
As he concludes, it is impossible to say for certain yet what will happen. But one thing we do know for sure: a great deal of pain will be felt by many people. And, as ever, it will be the worst off that suffer most. Contraction in the job market, higher consumer prices and an increase in mortgage repossessions will hit millions of people, and there will also be a major impact on the public finances: quite how Gordon Brown is going to fund his pledge to build three million new homes after this, I'm not sure.
Only when there's a much more widespread appreciation of the flaws inherent in the modern financial system, will it be possible to create conditions in which the majority will enjoy real economic security.
A while ago I was invited to visit the Reform Club in London's Pall Mall. Although rather anonymous from the street outside, the interior is a wonder to behold: the art decorating the walls is exquisite, the architecture and furniture, a tribute to the visual creativity and ambition of the Victorians.
Opened in 1841, membership was originally restricted to those who pledged support to the Great Reform Act of 1832. There is a small but fascinating permanent exhibition about the various reform acts which were the focus of member's efforts a century and a half ago. The Reform Club was the first of London's clubs to admit female members in 1981, and has a long history and supporting progressive causes and reflecting changes in wider society.
As we lunched in the slightly less plush buffet dining room I was struck by the profile of the membership today. The Club is no longer aligned to any political party (membership of the Liberal Party used to be a pre-condition of admission) but it apparently attracts civil servants from the nearby Treasury, whereas their colleagues from the Foreign Office generally patronise The Traveller's Club.
Looking aroud the dining room, it was difficut to imagine the Reform Club any longer providing a debating forum for progressive ideals or social reform. Perhaps, in the minds of today's members, enough has already been achieved. I'd like to imagine, however, that as the struggle for social justice continues, some of those who spend their time in the hallowed rooms of this historic building might follow the example of their forebears and join the struggle. Many of these people have considerable power: if change is to come, they will have an important role to play.
Fred Foldvary has an informative piece over at The Progress Report in which he rates the policies of US presidential candidates from both parties against the essential change criteria of the geolibertarian movement. He's especially good on the wacky tax plans of Republican hopeful, Mike Huckabee.
And why not check out Fred's fledgling political party, Free Earth. It's easy to dismiss such initiatives as marginal and therefore inconsequential, but as a concise programme for transformative social change, it's right on the button.
Those nice people over at Amazon have discounted my book, so if you haven't read it and would like a copy, you can buy it here.
When it was published, The Possibility of Progress garnered one or two positive comments.: Tony Benn thought it "a deeply moral and intellectual book". James Robertson called it "important, impressive and readable". Tony Vickers suggested that it might be "the book that Henry George would have written if he'd been alive today."
At the book launch Tony Benn, Clare Short and Susan Kramer all turned up to give their backing to the book, more information about which you can find here.
I'm currently working on another book which explores similar themes from different angles, but while that one is in production, The Possibility of Progress should keep you going.
If you're in the United States, you can order it through amazon.com by clicking here. (Sorry, no discount).
Of course, if you can afford it, and have an independent bookshop nearby, why not get them to order it in for you? It'll cost you the full price (£14.95) but you'll be supporting a small business, rather than a corporate giant, and contributing to the cause of progress in a tiny way.
Happy reading!
Mark
